Left loses the plot on real life - and the meaning of borders

About a decade ago, I noticed something distinctive about the Australian Left. It was wrong on every major issue for which the Australian parliament had legislative responsibility.

On economic policy, its belief in protectionism and industry welfare had been made to look ridiculous by the Keating revolution. Families which had been trapped for generations in blue-collar factory work were enjoying the benefits of economic liberalisation, business start-ups and booming prosperity. In social policy, the Left’s obsession with command-and-control public service provision was out of step with new attitudes in the outer suburbs. With extra money in their kick, people wanted to buy in the services which best suited their needs. It didn’t matter whether these were publicly or privately run, as long as they got the job done. Customisation was king.

The other big issue was border protection. I was battling the Labor For Refugees group and its determination to abolish offshore processing and mandatory detention. When John Howard introduced his Tampa legislation prior to the 2001 election, I was one of a handful of Labor MPs who would have been comfortable voting for it. On a question of competing interests (the needs of UN refugee camp asylum seekers versus unauthorised boat arrivals), the only way of avoiding a humanitarian disaster was to enforce the rule of law and an orderly, fair system of processing. I was perplexed as to how the Left could advocate open-door policies: an invitation for anarchy.

In each area, the so-called progressive wing of politics had failed. Why couldn’t these people understand the basis of sound policymaking and social justice?

To answer this dilemma, I set about analysing the lifestyle and life values of the mistaken Left; activists like the millionaire journalist
Phillip Adams
and my parliamentary colleagues representing gentrified inner-city boroughs. My conclusion was they had abstracted themselves from the empirical, commonsense views of suburban Australia. They saw issues as an exercise in ideological dogma, instead of problem-solving. Learning and adapting were foreign concepts.

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The lessons of Whitlamism in the 1960s and Keatingism in the 1980s – that Labor is strongest when it relies on practical ideas drawn from suburban electorates – had been forgotten. Ten years later, nothing has changed. Senators
Kim Carr
and
Doug Cameron
still regard government economic intervention as more important than market competition. The Left still talks about community services, such as school education, through the eyes of providers (teachers, union organisers and public servants) rather than recipients (students and parents).

For asylum seekers, the tragedy is doubly unfathomable. Not only has the Left’s open-door policy, as implemented by the Rudd government in 2008, led to 2000 people drowning, the fanatics who urged on this atrocity have shown no signs of contrition.

Unmoved by rows of body bags and tiny coffins loaded onto planes, the Greens still see that boat journeys between Indonesia and Australia are an act of compassion. The blood on their hands has had no impact on their sense of right and wrong.

Privately, Labor’s hard-Left faction despises the government’s new Papua New Guinea solution but, out of self interest, it sees no point in opposing a vote-winning policy this close to an election.

Apologists in denial

Elsewhere in the media, apologists for the open-door/drownings policy have re-emerged, no less brazen than a decade ago. Three types of rationalisation are being used.

The first is a straight denial of reality, the argument that deterrence strategies have never worked. Among others, the clownish
Charlie Pickering
has repeatedly made this claim on Channel 10’s The Project, ignoring the obvious success of the Howard government in stopping the boats. This is a strange reaction to truth. It is almost as if, psychologically, Howard’s record in saving lives – something which runs against the grain of everything Pickering believes in – cannot be accepted as reality.

The second rationalisation is to downplay the significance of death.

Last week, in an editor’s note to subscribers of The Monthly,
John van Tiggelen
complained that Australia’s “humanitarian obligations [have come] down to a single KPI: preventing the deaths of one in 25 boat people."

He lamented how “the complementary statistic, that of the crushed hopes and condemned lives of the other 96 per cent, will remain invisible, untold and unrecorded".

How can anyone look at the horror of boatloads of people drowning and try to establish some form of moral relativity against the circumstances of those still alive? The highest calling of one’s conscience – in many ways, the emotion which sets our civilisation apart from the animal world – is for the preservation of human life.

If 4 per cent are dying, the only compassionate response is to address the problem directly, regardless of the economic interests of the remaining 96 per cent.

The third stance is a surreal “business as usual" argument.

Last week, Adams returned to the opinion pages of The Australian on the boat people issue, rolling out words identical to those he used 10 years ago. He made no mention of the drownings, ignoring his long-running error in advocating policies that have made them more likely. Everyone else was at fault, all bar Adams.

Perhaps this tells us more about the Left than any other perspective.

When the world fails to comply with its ideological template, it uses ignorance as a way of keeping its beliefs alive. But then, when ignorance can no longer hold out the facts, when the evidence becomes overwhelming, it turns to Adams-style arrogance, lecturing others on where they went wrong.

The asylum-seeker crisis has changed Australian politics forever. The mistaken Left has forfeited its claim to moral superiority and a valid understanding of compassion. It now faces an uncomfortable truth. If left-wing politics means thousands of people drowning, we would be better off with no left-wing politics at all.